The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stone
These days, I’m a walking contradiction of confidence and frustration.
The confidence comes from the day in / day out consistently great results our predictive analytics help our customers get from their direct marketing campaigns. Yesterday one of our customers reported the results of an email campaign to almost a half million of their customers. Half got their business-as-usual, spray-and-pray standard email. The other half got individualized emails, with each customer being offered products that we determined they were ready to buy. The emails with the individualized product recommendaitons produced $0.99 MORE REVENUE PER EMAIL than the one-size-fits-all message. When you multiply by the total number of emails sent to customers, that’s a very big revenue lift.
We’re seeing results like this all the time, which is the basis for my confidence. We’re also dealing with some customers who have a deep-seated aversion to changing their direct marketing practices. That’s where my frustration arises. And throw in a little more frustration for those of our customers who know they are getting great results but don’t want to talk about it for competitive reasons. At least I can understand that.
But the world is changing. Applying customer analytics is the new way to do direct marketing. The Stone Age ended because humans learned to work with metal. We’ve learned to work with big data. Spray-and-pray is yesterday’s flint stone arrowhead